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Friday, November 29, 2013

If you know me, you know I'm a creature of stability. Of routine. Of not shaking things up too much. Hubby is, too; maybe even more so than I am.

I've lived in the same small town my whole life. Hubby has lived there for almost all of his.

So, we shocked a LOT of people when we sort of abruptly moved 350 miles away from home last month.

Wait, what? I still don't really believe it myself. Let me back up for a second.

Back in 2003, I went to work for a national company that had a location in my town. I didn't always love the job itself (though most of the time I was happy enough with it), but I loved the company. I had good benefits and with the exception of one jerkface loser - that's a story for a whole other post - I had good, supportive management, which I'm sure you know can make or break a job.

Until the aforementioned jerkface loser decided that our location wasn't meeting his expectations and he closed it, putting me out of a job.

Jerk.

I was offered a position in the office 350 miles south. They told me they really wanted to keep me. They tried to tempt me with a position they knew I'd enjoy. But we were still trying to adopt, and our families were all nearby, and we just weren't interested in relocating.

Anyway, the timing all worked out pretty okay. Allie was born a week before my layoff (and they granted me an early layoff complete with an intact severance package). So I was free from work obligations during that whole ordeal. That was definitely a blessing. And I was in my last four months of college, so that was good too.

A couple months later, I went back to work in the same industry but for a different company. I liked it there. It was really laid back and a good family-oriented place to work. I really loved that.

But the other place never did stop trying to convince me to relocate and go back to work for them. At least a few times a year, I'd hear from them, asking if I'd consider it yet. No, no, and no, I told them.

Then something happened.

I ran out of money.

And then they called again.

I had a much harder time saying no. We almost said yes that time (which was in June of this year). I approached my current boss and let him know that they were after me and making some attractive offers. I told him what I needed in order to make it worthwhile to stay. He was able to get about halfway there, so that definitely helped. We decided to stay. It was a big load off, not having to move and leave everything we had and knew.

Then came August, and another struggle to cover the month's bills. The new salary still wasn't going to cut it through the winter. I was losing sleep and getting sick over how we were going to survive without doing something drastic.

Then the phone rang. "How about more money?"

Hmm. Hard to ignore the timing of all that and how it all lined up. We kicked the idea around amongst ourselves. We debated. We argued. We flat-out fought. (He was against going; I was terrified but didn't see any other way to survive the winter without some really drastic lifestyle changes that I knew he'd be unhappy with anyway.) It was agonizing and stressful and I started having headaches because of it.

It took WEEKS of this before we finally came to a decision and both felt... okay... about it.